Honors College Dean Candidates to Visit Campus, Present Public Lectures

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The three final candidates for the position of Honors College dean at the University of Arkansas will visit campus in September for interviews and public forums. All faculty, staff and students are encouraged to attend these presentations.

The candidates are Naomi Yavneh Klos, director of the University Honors Program at Loyola University in New Orleans; Jerry Herron, dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University in Detroit; and Sumana Datta, executive director of the Honors and Undergraduate Research Program at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Naomi Yavneh Klos will make an open forum presentation at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 8, in room 120 of the Reynolds Center.

Yavneh Klos completed her undergraduate degree in comparative literature at Princeton University and subsequently completed master’s and doctoral degrees in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a professor of interdisciplinary humanities at the University of South Florida for 12 years, and then became the institution’s first university-wide director of undergraduate research and associate dean of the Honors College. In 2011 she became the first full-time director of the University Honors Program at Loyola University, New Orleans, where she also serves as a professor of languages and cultures. Yavneh Klos is a former president of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and founding director of the Arts and Humanities Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research. She is a member of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Honors Consortium and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Collegiate Honors Council. Yavneh Klos received a Phi Beta Kappa Fellowship and a Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship to the Vatican, and was in the inaugural cohort of Loyola’s Ignatian Faculty Fellows Program.

Yavneh Klos has published extensively on gender and spirituality in Italian Renaissance culture and has published and lectured frequently on undergraduate research and honors education. She is currently writing a book titled Not Just for Jesuits: Ignatian Values in Honors and Beyond. Yavneh Klos is fluent in Italian and French and reads Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebrew.

Jerry Herron will make an open forum presentation at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 18, in room 120 of the Reynolds Center.

Herron earned a bachelor’s degree in English with high honors from the University of Texas at Austin, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in English completed at Indiana University. His career at Wayne State University spans 32 years. In addition to teaching and serving as associate chair in the English department, he was director of the American Studies Program and interim assistant provost. In 2002 he became chair of the university’s honors program following a national search, with the charge to grow the program into a college. In 2008, he was named founding dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State. Herron has served on the board of the National Collegiate Honors Council since 2009 and was recently elected vice president; he is slated to become president in two years. Among other honors, he has twice received the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from Wayne State University.

His publications include two books, Universities and the Myth of Cultural Decline, and AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. He is currently finishing a third, titled Living with Detroit: An All-Purpose History of America. His articles and reviews have been widely published, and he served as associate editor of Criticism for 18 years and was cofounder and editor of Structuralist Review. He has also published articles and given presentations on honors education.

Sumana Datta will make an open forum presentation at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 29, in room 120 of the Reynolds Center.

Datta earned two honors degrees, in chemistry and in cellular and molecular biology, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned a doctoral degree in biology at the University of California, San Diego, and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in biology at Yale. She has taught at Texas A&M since 1993 in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and Center for Advanced Invertebrate Molecular Studies, with a joint appointment in the Department of Biology. She also served as an interdepartmental faculty member in the university’s genetics and neuroscience programs. From 2008-10 Datta served as assistant dean of undergraduate research, and since 2010 she has led the University Honors Program, where she is responsible for administration of four college and 19 departmental honors programs. She has also served as a visiting professor in the Department of Urology, Winship Cancer Institute, at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Datta has won numerous awards, including the National Institutes of Health Senior Ruth L. Kirschstein Fellowship (2005-06), Outstanding Faculty Member, Texas A&M Women’s Former Students’ Network (2009), and the Service Learning Faculty Fellowship (2013). She has numerous publications and presentations that contribute to knowledge of brain development and prostate cancer, and many of her publications include undergraduate student coauthors. She has also published and presented extensively on undergraduate research recruitment and success.

A half-hour reception will follow each of the candidate’s talks.

Complete vitas for all of the candidates are available at the Honors College website.

The search committee is led by Javier Reyes, vice provost for distance education and professor of economics, and includes Sidney Burris, professor of English and director of the Fulbright Honors Program; Ed Clausen, professor of chemical engineering; Kirstin Erickson, associate professor of anthropology and director of Latin American and Latino Studies; Gary Ferrier, University Professor of Economics; Carol Gattis, associate dean of the Honors College and associate professor of engineering; Padma Mana, Honors College student ambassador and Bodenhamer Fellow; Mark Power, associate vice chancellor for development; Ann Rosso, Campaign Arkansas Steering Committee and chair of the Honors College Campaign Committee; and Nan Smith-Blair, associate professor of nursing.